Paracelsus (Part 2)

Transcript (PDF)

Hermetic Tradition (New Series)
Presentation 12 of 13

Paracelsus, Part 2
Continued
Presented by Roger Weir
Thursday, September 18, 1986

Transcript:

If you have nature as a base, nature will always internalize itself in terms of a symbol, but the symbol, when it projects itself back out on the base not of nature but of magic – magia – creates a sigil. So that if someone is going to deal with themselves, with transformation, you're looking for the symbol. But if you're looking to transform out there in the world you're looking for the sigil which you can put on it. This process is called Art as in Alchemy the Art, it means that you can make reality. This is the power of magic. Magic is very powerful, but it's elusive because it does not work exactly like nature. It is a response to nature. So that as nature puts out a series, magic in responding to it, responds also in a series with– the series takes in the interval. So that you always have in consciousness a symbolic base for magically coming to the placing of sigils.

This particular sigil from Paracelsus is from the Archidoxis of Magic, and it is a sigil against flies– Flies. “These creatures do so much infest men's houses in summertime and do corrupt and putrefy meat. To drive them away do thus make a coffin of steel and upon the coffin engrave these signs which you see in the following figure.” I have them up there. “And upon the coffin from the separation of the said signs and words let there be engraven three lines tending towards the cup and one in the new moon, one in the second in the full moon, and the third in the new moon again. Draw these lines over a time duration. Afterwards under the conjunction of Jupiter and the moon write the words in the following and signs following.” And this is the magical sigil which one adds to the amulet to make it work. “If you then with this place this upon a wall of a house and draw a circle around it with chalk” – chalk – “about the compass of a great round table all flies that are thereabouts will enter in the circle and remain there until you take the steel coffin away and then they will fly away vexing men as at first.”

Practical lessons. Let him who has flies here.

It's difficult because we're told all the time that magic works by correspondences. And it does. But that the correspondences are not what we would imagine them to be in our naivete. And this is why the Art comes in – one has to know how to do this. Now for Paracelsus, as we have seen, he becomes an excruciating example of a man upon whom all the eggs are placed in one basket. He becomes the focus of the entire Hermetic tradition. He becomes temporarily the new man for whom this gigantic step in consciousness suddenly throws him about two hundred years in the future in terms of his consciousness. But he finds himself alive still in a decaying Renaissance social milieu and that in its decaying Medieval subconscious complexes are coming up and beginning to swirl around and magnetize the whole situation. So that he finds himself extraordinarily progressive, caught up in the swirl of immense catastrophic regressive psychological storm and he is not at all prepared for this. He is not taught about this because no one at that time had any idea of these large scale structures of the psyche, these large scale structures of history, the way that they operate. We know today from depth psychology, for instance, with an individual when you get to a certain level of maturity you will be faced with a very awesome task of having to incorporate in yourself your own shadow, your own negative aspects, your– your personal resistances. You will have to work them in. And that just as you work in the personal resistances, just as you attain some equilibrium as a person, everything goes wrong in a very large structural way because the integration of the personal negativities just qualifies you then for Hardball, and the very deep collective polarities come into play. And assume then that you are able to deal with this. Have you not integrated yourself? Are you not together? Well, here is the whole deeper, not so much a complex which has neurotic overtones from the subconscious, but archetypes which have psychotic overtones from what we would today call the collective psyche.

And so Paracelsus, struggling mightily to achieve himself to integrate this tremendously advanced consciousness, which he was given because he was talented, he was prepared, he was on the spot. He had the best teachers you could have. They really prepared him. But he found himself in a social situation where he was simply outclassed by the deep unconscious polarities which had come up. And we'll see tonight that Paracelsus tries very heroically to try and find some way to deal with this. He does not succeed. He dies at the age of 48 in a barroom brawl in Salzburg – 1541 September 24th. So next week will be the 445th anniversary of Paracelsus being slugged to death. You can't do much about changing the world when you die in a barroom brawl. You have to stay around.

But Paracelsus is so far advanced psychologically beyond his contemporaries that only a few individuals are able to appreciate his significance. One of them incidentally was Martin Luther who appreciated the fact that someone like Paracelsus could be around his– nailing his theses on the door comes about twenty-seven, twenty-eight years after Pico lists his nine hundred theses publicly. But Luther does not want to debate these. He says this is a spiritual bill of rights.

Part of the basis of this change lies in the way in which the Hermetic tradition had prepared for about forty or fifty years the development of a consciousness that there was a peculiar universal parallel between the Philosopher's Stone and Christ. And that Christ in order to work in the alchemical transformation, had to be free access in terms of the individual. The person had to have access to the Christ figure because it was only the Christ figure that could deal with these enormous polarities, these archetypal unconscious polarities, that came up– could deal with the psychotic amphitheater which the individual even though he is able to deal with the neurotic patterns and finally come to some understanding and integrate them is almost helpless against the psychotic dimensions that come up. He can build a boat of his own self, but he can't swallow the ocean. He has to have some way to navigate on that ocean even though his boat is well made. Even though his soul is safe he can't manage the ocean in the same way.

Part of the difficulty in misunderstanding of the times, especially among those who are responsible for it lay in their naivete. And sophisticated teachers like Trithemius tried their best to make explicit, as explicit as they could, the very delicate matrix out of which transformation actually happens. That the matrix in which transformation actually happens in the real magia requires a real person, someone, to move in sigil-like form in the world, in nature, in its hierarchies, in all of its hierarchies, to evoke out the transformation and that you can't do this in a mental imaginative approximation. You have to do this in a specific way with yourself in actuality in the whole span of nature.

Part of the misunderstanding which still comes in today, plagues us today, but which was chronic at that time is the correspondences that were set up between the planetary spheres – the seven planetary spheres – and the seven basic metals. There are seven planets and seven metals and that the correspondences between them seem to be one-on-one and that one can make a convenient list later on as Basil Valentine did in the 17th century. But remember that in the Hermetic tradition this seven-sphered hebdomad is exactly the resistance ladder that one has to break through. It's exactly this form that holds us back. So that if your idea of nature, your idea of transformation, is all based on one versus one equivalency limited by this old mentality, limited by this partial understanding of the old order, you're going to remain trapped in the seven. You will think that if you transfer, transform, mercury into gold, if knowledge into power if that's it. Isn't that the saying, knowledge is power? It was the short form of the alchemical mystery. The way in which the transformations of mercury can eventually be projected upon all the metals, up to and including gold. That in this way the person can take his mercurial, his transformative nature, and work on all of the levels within himself up to the real self. But that hebdomad is a trap. It is the trap. And in the Hermetic tradition it was the achievement of the ogdoad not the wandering around in the hebdomad. That was the sign of maturity, of wholeness. It was the achievement of the ogdoad so that one cannot start with knowledge. One cannot start with gnosis. One cannot start with the mercurial transformative quality of oneself and reach fruition.

If one starts from knowledge and starts from gnosis. If one starts knowing. If one starts with the transformative qualities you will remain trapped in this world, in this universe. And the best you can do is manipulate correspondences and hope you can dodge the recursive balance because they will manipulate you, because the polarities, in that psychic stew, hold like an engineering principle. So that when Trithemius gives us and gave ourselves this order he did not begin with knowledge but he began with a base called studies. We today would call this the empirical stance. You don't look to what you know, but you look to learn from what is there. So that the order does not start with one and end with seven. It starts up here with one and ends with eight. And in the old Hermetic tradition when one had achieved the realization of the ogdoad, one was looking back freed from the hebdomad, freed from these graduated resistances, from these planetary spheres which held you in the thrall of the psychic correlations – you had to dance to that tune – you were freed from that. But in the ogdoad in the eighth one could finally perceive the ninth. And in Trithemius formulation, the ninth, which should be unnumbered, is what he calls miracle.

So that the arcane transformative ordering in the Hermetic tradition given to Paracelsus by Trithemius in Würzburg around 1510, 1511. Studies generate knowledge; knowledge bears love; love creates likeness; likeness calls forth communion; communion delivers virtue; virtue manifests dignity; dignity allows for power; and power performs miracle.

This is the unique path to magical perfection – divine and natural – from which all superstitious and diabolical wizardry is totally separated and by which it is confounded. Why is it totally separated? Why is it confounded? Because in this progression, the seven stages, the seven stadia, the seven planetary spheres, the hebdomad is put into a parenthetical matrix which is bounded on the outside by studies and by miracle. When man operates with this scale, with this dimension, he is freed from the ignorance of this world.

This is how the Hermetic tradition looked in 1500, roughly. This was how it was passed on and so that zodiacal man, if we see a portrait of him – and I should have made up a slide I suppose – but Zodiacal man has all of the seven levels upon his body, but they're placed within his body. And so the study of medicine, to Paracelsus, is not the study of any part, but the study of the whole man, who includes all of these but something more the studying of it and the studying of it towards the transformation of it. So that when Paracelsus is looking he's looking with a whole new eye on man. And so when he says, of physicians who are following Galen or Avicenna, that you're just consulting your books, you're just playing with correspondences. I am treating the whole man with a new kind of medicine, an iatrochemical medicine. It deals with specifics. It deals with empirical specifics because the correspondences are important, they do work. The disease always gives the indication of the cure. But one has to be able to have a hermetic vision of the whole in order to see how one cannot only restore oneself, using these correspondences, but how one can finally free oneself when all the correspondences are in harmony. This is the grand design. Not simply to adjust someone, but to heal someone, to cure someone. The curer of souls. But in this progression nature is the basis for the studies. But art, leading to miracle, can only be practiced in a transpersonal way. And this is where Christ comes in for them because one is dealing with a very very difficult matrix.

And at this time Europe was convulsed with the social debacle of hundreds of thousands of individuals who were stirred up to this subconsciously, alerted to this, unable to integrate for themselves, searching around for leaders, and out of this milieu come the Anabaptist movements, the Brethren of the Common Lot, all of the Protestant movements. And then the viciousness balancing that coming in, for instance, in Salzburg on Christmas Day of I think it was 1524 all of the men in Salzburg were arraigned and questioned on their religious beliefs. And Paracelsus was let go because – he was there – because of him being a famous noted physician. Many of the men were simply killed before Christmas Day.

This kind of massacre went on year after year and year. We see peasant wars. We see religious wars in strife. All of this an indication of an enormous upset in the archetypal balance. Not so much the personal unconscious balance, but the archetypal balance had been upset. Every time there's an advance in consciousness there is a price to be paid because the new world has to be integrated for it to remain there. Otherwise it tends to vanish, to not manifest itself.

So Paracelsus in dealing with his correspondences with like is always trying to keep that perspective in this larger transformative realm. And the two qualities that are there are the guidelines of alchemy that one must deal with nature empirically. What is there? But one must master the art. And nature and art together then allow for the process to come to a fruition or at least to have a chance for this fruition. Out of this Paracelsus develops the tremendous pairing of them– of two different alchemical processes. One of them is the process of the Red Lion which he learned from Trismosin. And Trismosin’s process of the Red Lion is the development of what he called the tincture of the sun – number eight here. In The Alchemical and Hermetic Writings of Paracelsus, in the little four-page, three-page treatise on the Treasure of Treasures for Alchemists, Paracelsus talks to us through his convoluted writings,

“Concerning the Red Lion.”
“Afterwards take the lion in the pelican which is also found first [and] when you see its tincture, that is to say, the element of fire which stands above the water, the air, and the earth. Separate it from its deposit by trituration. Thus you will have the true aurum potabile.” The potable gold. “Sweeten this with the alcohol of wine poured over it, and then distill in an alembic until you perceive no acidity to remain in the Aqua Regia. This Oil of the Sun, enclosed in a retort hermetically sealed, you must place for elevation that it may be exalted and doubled in its degree. Then put the vessel, still closely shut, in a cool place. Thus it will not be dissolved, but coagulated. Place it again for elevation and coagulation, and repeat this three times. Thus will be produced the Tincture of the Sun, perfect in its degree. [and] Keep this in its own place.”

This tincture of the sun is able to project then, the dissolve, the potable gold, upon other metals. But the process of the Green Lion is different. The process of the Green Lion:

“Concerning the Green Lion.”
“Take the vitriol of Venus, carefully prepared according to the rules of [the] Spagyric Art, and add thereto the elements of water and air which you have reserved. Resolve, and set to putrefy for a month according to instructions. [And] When the putrefaction is finished, you will behold the sign of the elements.”

The sign– in Latin the word is the astrum, the sigil of the elements. That is to say each of the four elements has a magical sigil, which is its operative focus in transmutation that as long as the element is there, qua element, it's natural. But as the element goes into its transformative mode the sigil controls that element, and he who controls that sigil consciousness can then transform it – use it in transformation. Because man has all of the sigils within himself; he contains the universe.

“When this putrefaction is finished, you will behold the sign of the elements. Separate, and you will soon see two colors, namely, white and red. The [white is above the red]. The red tincture of the vitriol is so powerful that it reddens all white bodies, and whitens all red ones, which is wonderful. Work this tincture by means of a retort, and you will perceive a blackness issue forth. Treat it again by means of the retort, repeating the operation until it comes out whitish. Go on, and do not despair of the work. Rectify until you find the true, clear Green Lion, which you will recognize by its great weight. [and] You will see that it is heavy and large. This is the Tincture, [of the] transparent gold.”

And the transparent gold in the Green Lion is not so much for projecting out, but for magnetically bringing within. This is what transforms the person. This is what transforms the individual. That in the balance of alchemy one can use both these processes. And we should have had a slide I think, made from the Ripley Scroll where the Green Lion and the Red Lion face each other like the two Lions of a royal insignia and they rear themselves up in the [inaudible] in the middle. The one allows for us to go back to nature and transform it. The other allows for us to proceed within and transform ourselves. That clear gold, Paracelsus tells us, is most interesting and most useful. He says of this,

“You will see [the] marvelous signs of this Green Lion, such as could be bought by no treasures of the Roman Leo. Happy he who has learnt how to find it and use it for a tincture!” So that the qualities of the transformed self then are able to manifest themselves in whole, become specific, and actually occur in reality. And the new man is actually born.

One of the ways in which this hermetic process was struggled with to be understood in this crisis time was the aspect of adult baptism. That it's not enough to be baptized as a baby, but that when you're an adult you have to have a second baptism. You have to be reborn. You are born into the nature of the divinity and baptized there. But you have to be reborn by the art of understanding, and that this creates, then, the real religious individual. For this, if there is any kind of interference from a worldly structure one remains then caught in this seven-stage resistance matrix. And that the Roman Church was seen to have become the– the agent, almost the agent provocateur, of this misunderstanding in the world. So that the Protestant movement, the anabaptist movement of the time, the religious turmoil of the time, the reason why hundreds of thousands of people were killed, were willing to die, were willing to fight for this, was that their very understanding of their souls was at stake.

Paracelsus life weaves in and out. He's the only moving needle in this whole fabric of turmoil that we can see. And the life of Paracelsus is extremely valuable and powerful for us because it's through the life of Paracelsus that we can understand everything that was at stake at the time, and the true view of how all of this devolved and came out. In fact, the issues raised at that time were to simmer, not only during the 16th century but during the 17th century, and they were the ones that were to come to the fore in the 18th century. So that two hundred and fifty years after the death of Paracelsus we find the American Revolution and the French Revolution all over the same issue. And in that time enough individuals had come to be stable within that new consciousness that they could finally affect a transformation and a change and make some of these structures come into what we call history, come into reality. So Paracelsus is extremely valuable in this.

The last alchemist to work with the Green Lion was Isaac Newton and, published by Cambridge University Press – I think quite recently in 1975 – The Foundations of Newton's Alchemy: The Hunting of the Green Lyon. And there's a wonderful account in here of Sir Isaac and his struggle for this. I won't go into this– all of it– all of it. The author points out that the– credit to Carl Jung for finding a model which balances the– the two processes, bringing them out so we can understand them. She writes, “It may be noted, leaving Jung aside for a moment, that alternative overemphases first on one side” – the practical working with metals side, the working with nature, metallurgy, and then the overemphasis of working on the interior alone, the religious quality, that as long as those two processes were in balance together the Hermetic tradition which had engendered a way of working with them together was operative.

The person who brought those two traditions together and held them together was Plotinus. Plotinus in the third century not only spiritualizes matter, but he materializes spirit. And working from the Neo-Plotinian tradition all the way to Ficino, all the way to Trithemius, all the way to Pico and Reuchlin, that tradition held together. And matter and spirit were hermetically sealed and together Paracelsus received the tradition. He’s still hermetically sealed. He still– still deals with matters, spiritually, and with his spirit in a material way not a materialist but he understands that they're interrelated. But in his time the misunderstanding of the correspondences allowed for an overemphasis on either one or the other, and there came to be this great seesaw where persons said, well the interior doesn't interest me but the making of gold the making of the of the metal, working with the the material that interests me. Or on the other hand people would say the alchemists who try to make gold are stupid charlatans. I want only the religious transformation. I want only the understanding of the transcendental qualities of this.

And so the tradition became polarized at the time of Paracelsus and that's why through the rest of the 16th and into the early part of the 17th century, wherever you have individuals who are dealing with alchemy you have a lot of instability in their life and in their character, which is not there before. When you look at classic alchemy the way in which the classic hermetic tradition came into Europe, at the time of Raymond Llull and Roger Bacon, Albertus Magnus, these are– these are pillars of the civilization. These are individuals who are so stable– Bacon was thrown into prison for twenty or thirty years at a time. Never phased him. He wrote all of his books in such a wonderful cipher – they still haven't been completely deciphered today. Using his tremendous memory to remember all of the quotations – they gave him no library – tremendously stable individuals. But when you come to the late 16th century and the early 17th century you have the titanic struggle of individuals just to maintain themselves.

The Shakespearean hero is dealing all the time with unbearable tensions within himself. Don Quixote is the knight errant, is trying to maintain that he sees reality and Cervantes is challenging us, does he? But in the 13th century you don't find any of that. The 13th century yields the tremendous stable visions of the 14th century. The mystical geniuses. Almost all of them live in the 14th century. Meister Eckhart and the anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing, Julian of Norwich, John of Ruysbroeck. You name them, they're all there. But the aftermath of the alchemists of the quattrocento are different. These are individuals who struggle mightily, like John Dee, to try and find some way of dealing with demonic forces that he senses have an in to him. They have buttons which they can push and make him dance. He wants to learn how to control them. And so his experiments with Edward Kelly, with angel magic, sanctified by the Queen of England, because they were all afraid of this.

So we have a tremendous change that is happening here and Paracelsus is almost alone. The only individual of his time who is aware of the momentous change – and he refers to himself sometimes as a son of God (small s, large g) – that in the miracle of transmutation, he writes, in here, “...vitriol makes copper out of iron. This is a natural virtue, not affected by the alchemist but by the vitriol through the alchemist. It seems amazing that a metal should have the quality to disappear and turn into another. It is as strange as turning a man into a woman. God has given a free hand to nature though not to man. Therefore in denying transmutation, Aristotle was foolish. Now I shall give you the prescription so that all parts of the German nation will be able to turn iron into copper.”

The prescription, the empirical studies which have come up with the formula. And this tremendous advance in Paracelsus is that he is not any longer juggling correspondences but he is integrating to the formulas based on the empirical experience. It's the very beginnings of what we today understand as scientific research. This is a monumental change in consciousness. Why is it monumental? No people ever in history did this. These are the first; this is the first time it was ever done. As close as the genius of Hellenistic Alexandria came in the third century to developing what we would recognize as science or technology, they were– they were a thousand years away because they did not have the consciousness. But Paracelsus is a modern man. He thinks like we think. Like we have learned to think. And he realizes that through experiment, and through keeping careful notation of what actually occurs of the processes and not being fixed in the static materia but seeing that the material have to move according to processes and that if man is keeping his perspective on the whole of all the processes, if he's being universal, he will be able to finally understand how they exactly were and write out the formula, write out the equation, and say if you follow this sigil and transform this into nature it will work.

Paracelsus is the only man of his time who could have understood that somebody could take E= MC2 and make an atomic bomb. That the mathematical formula, the sigil, is extremely powerful. If you have the matrix of understanding of what it is that you are writing and the processes by which you can transform nature by your art of magical consciousness into that is extraordinarily powerful.

[break]

I think I'll start off with a quotation here and just– this is from The Foundations of Newton's Alchemy. It's a good book, it's a fine book, but we have to cut very fine here because we're trying to understand something which has not been really appreciated. There have been a few individuals who have understood this difference. Mr. Hall– in Mr. Hall's writings you can see that he has understood and he has labored for sixty years to try and create the kind of intellectual understanding of so-called occultism which is essential. We have to have it. Mrs. Dobbs writes (page 31):

“The ‘shadow,’ however, comprises only the personal unconscious. Even if it is successfully incorporated into the ‘self,’ the individual must still face the deeper realms of unconsciousness where the psychic functions, occurring still in pairs, can be known only through archetypal images common to all mankind. Here Jung has done some of his most important work: in identifying the great mysterious symbols of alchemy as psychic images.”

We have to revise this somewhat. We have to use our language carefully here. We have to almost be scientific in our accuracy. These are not alchemical symbols so much as they are alchemical sigils – they are meant to operate. Alchemy is not the passive integration. Alchemy is the active projection. This is the magic realm. This is magia. The Hermetic tradition has a integration mode and then it has a projection mode going out. When we think of the alchemical processes as a transmutation leading to the achievement of self we'll be in very good unions, but we're not being very good hermeticists. We're not really understanding the tradition. It would be the first. He always said in his writings that everything that he was doing was empirical. And there will be others that come after him who will better this. This is the scientific way.

He was like Paracelsus in that he went as far as he could go with the background that he had, with the self-imposed limitations that he had. And it wasn't until the end of his life that he really opened up and answered the joke in some of the other late works and just opened up and he said I'm going to have my say. I've earned the right to have my say. And he did. And in those works Jung does not give summations. He asks very profound questions. So we can't just accept and stay at Jung's level. We can't just say, well, glibly yeah it seems that there are several thousand people now glibly talking about all the achievement of self by the alchemical process of transmutation. One does not achieve the self by alchemical transformation. One can find the personal symbol of oneself through the interiorization of meaning. And that is really powerful. But then to live that integration into the world, into one's life process, is a whole other process complementary to the first. And this is where our age is completely fallen on its face. No one lives anymore. Everyone is achieving me. And so busy in achieving me that there's getting to be an awful lot of drafty space in between people. I mean the first thing you really want to ask is who do you think you are? And mean it scientifically.

Paracelsus deals not so much with the emphasis on the coming in to realization because he had tremendous teachers. He was– he was, as we would say, ball-peened into fine shape. He was a toughie but he was prepared really well. The sword that he carried with him, he carried to bed with him, he carried to eat with him. And in the pommel of the handle was a medicine that he found in Constantinople. It's an alcohol of– of opium called laudanum which had other elements in it that made it seem mysterious. Laudanum was very powerful. It was a real modern medicine. Is a medicine, is a chemical medicine. Paracelsus is the first one to use the term chemistry and mean it. The science of chemistry starts with Paracelsus. The culmination of alchemy is with Paracelsus, and chemistry as a science begins with him. He's the first chemist.

And the first advance beyond Paracelsus is Robert Boyle in the 1680s. That's almost a hundred forty years after the man died. You can see how far ahead he was. And Robert Boyle, when he was writing in the 1680s, that the way that vitriol works is that the copper as an element is dissolved in the solution and that's why it'll coat iron and make a copper coating on it if you dip it in there. But the understanding of it, even in the 1680s, there were very few people who could understand that who bought that who had the consciousness who could conceive of that elements. Because it wasn't until way into the 18th century that Joseph Priestley isolated oxygen. One of Benjamin Franklin's friends. And said there are such things as building blocks of nature. Elements, real elements.

But that Paracelsus is starting to think that way in the 1520s was just amazing. It's absolutely amazing. And he finds himself out on a limb, just like Leonardo found himself out on a limb. He could daydream and doodle on the gears and everything but it began to get to him because he realized that– that all of this is possible. Submarines, airplanes, it's– there's nothing to stop you. You could do this. For consciousness to come to this realization in the 1520s is very scary. And so these men were high strung to put it mildly. Paracelsus and Leonardo were not the sort of people you're going to have to dinner, unless you're going to have rolls and sauerkraut and beer and spill it on the floor. These are unmanageable men.

But the Hermetic tradition which had been sophisticated all those millennia came together there. And this is the most important thing to understand because our own time is this kind of a refocusing of what happened then. What happened then didn't quite get put into sync and had to come back again for, sort of like a second coming. And the second coming of the Renaissance man is in the early 20th century. That's when you really have somebody – like Einstein – who is a whole other kind, whole other variety of consciousness from what was before him. It’s a gigantic step in evolution, whole different consciousness. And the specificity in Einstein's mind is incredibly fine. The only way that we can understand what is going on in our own time is to go back and see the original template, to see the historical development, to see the way in which the Hermetic tradition – the major spiritual current of our civilization – came to a productive node and produced a couple of individuals who try to exemplify it, but were completely drowned out by the submerged by the negative oceanic psychic conundrums that came up in that time.

So we have this very real problem.

Paracelsus in writing about quintessence. Quintessence. He writes, “It is not proper to say much about the Philosopher's Stone or to boast about its possession. The ancients have indicated the recipe for those who have true understanding. However, they used parables to keep unworthy persons from knowing and misusing it.”

And one of the safeguards all the way through the Hermetic tradition was always to present the teaching and kind of a staggered patterned way so that the uninitiated could not just take it on a one-to-one correspondence basis. But by the Italian Renaissance especially, coming into possession of the material, making the translations, and then the northern European, the Germanic mind especially, taking this and codifying it at a time when they wanted to make it available to every man. Everybody should have access to this. Not just the Pope and the priest but every man. But the preparation was not there for every man. He was still living his life as his life had been lived in the 1100s or 1200s. And he's given brand new super consciousness of the individual. And the first thing that happened was that he got scared. He got afraid. He didn't want to be out there alone. And so those individuals clung together. And so religious communities at that time were completely closely knit. They were– they were movements that were closer than families. Your religious community was everything to you. It was your only safety.

The only individuals that were moving around in Europe at that time – and there were just a few of them – and Paracelsus is the most outstanding. He traveled everywhere that he could go. He went the entire circuit of the European subcontinent. He went to North Africa and Spain. He went up through England, in the Netherlands, up through Scandinavia, up into northern Sweden. He went all the way over to Russia through the Ukraine. He went to Tataria to Kazan and Tatarian, came down to Constantinople. He went to Jerusalem; he went to Alexandria. He went up the Nile and back. He made the complete circumference of the– of the world, the Hellenistic world, in which this mentality had been born and had come to focus in him. And he realized it.

In Paracelsus’s writings though you find him struggling with this dictum that you're you're not you're supposed to keep it from unworthy persons and so you leave out essential elements from the formula so that if they don't have the training they won't be able to use that formula. But what happens is is you have dozens if not hundreds and eventually thousands of individuals who say, I can fill this in myself. I know what this is. I have my own private experience. I have my own mystical vision. I have my own imagination. And they fill it in in their own way. And so you get these chimerical happenings. You get the true charlatans. We're not trained at all in the Hermetic tradition. They can't make reality work. They can't make a human being integrate and manifest. They can't pull off the big magic of being able to have life happen. And the whole sunburst of actuality occur. But they don't want to admit this. So they accuse each other of not. What is your tradition? What is your lineage? Who is your teacher? Well who is his teacher? All this kind of bickering.

And the 16th century becomes a cloud of half-baked individuals. And out of this mist towards the end of that time there are a few great individuals who try to plumb the universality of human character –like Cervantes, or like Shakespeare, or like Rembrandt, or like Spinoza – try to plumb the essence of the universal mysteriousness of human character. But that's really– that's the crucible. Paracelsus becomes the prototype of the struggling individual. But notice he's the prototype of the struggling individual, not of the accomplished individual. And so the legacy that Western civilization gets at this time is that the individual is real in the struggle. This kind of dog-like comes in, this kind of– of tangent. We receive in our own time the dictum that without tension nothing is possible. Without conflict there's no advance. All these kinds of household phrases. The sort of subconscious homilies which are extraordinarily misleading, which scramble us up. And when you're seventeen or eighteen you don't even have a chance. There's no way whatsoever.

In the tradition, one of the most peculiar aspects in alchemy, what was– was called the star regulus of antimony. If the alchemical processes go right with stibnite, which is a kind of a mineral, one can dissolve the antimony. And if the antimony crystals precipitate out just right they follow a kind of a fern-like pattern which becomes overlaid in almost a cubistic kind of a way. So that what is at the bottom of the crucible, when the process is over, is a glittering shiny star-shaped, cubist star-shaped mass. And what's peculiar to that is one can see that all of the structural lines converge to a center and disappear. That the center is not there is invisible but all the structure goes into there. To a hermetic eye this is the sigil of the mysteriousness of the unknown. This is the– this is the physical presentation of it.

And so in the 17th century the great alchemical document will be from Basil Valentine. The Triumphal Chariot of Antimony. This is– This is the vehicle that takes you on the royal road of transformation. This becomes a symbol for the achievement of the sparkling, dazzling self that converges all structural lines upon the unknown God within. And it becomes a sigil whereby one can project that out onto the world and transform it. And that becomes, in the 18th century, tremendous goad to remake the world in terms of the enlightened man – the first truly enlightened generation. And they no longer even talk about the Hermetic tradition, but they live it. Voltaire, Benjamin Franklin, etc. They lived this. And this becomes in fact the– the guideline of the time.

In the– in the 18th century Paracelsus is long forgotten. Almost nobody remembers him at that time. In this biography of Paracelsus by Henry Pachter, Magic into Science, he concludes this wonderful little exposition on Paracelsus:

“Whereas charlatans pretended that the Stone, if found, would enrich their masters and clients [monetarily], The great researchers sought a quite different kind of wealth: [and an] Elixir that perfects everything, reduces all substance to primal matter, and creates or prolongs life. These men, [were] wise enough to leave gold-making alone, were dreaming of an ever greater folly. They expected to distill in their pelicans, alembics, crucibles, and athanors the most perfect and most precious thing in the world, the soul, or, as Paracelsus occasionally says, ‘the chaos.’ ‘If you wish to succeed in such a work, you must separate spirit and life in nature, and make the astral soul in yourself tangible; then the substance of your soul will appear visibly.’ ”

And this splitting way of life and spirit in nature is the fall. It's here that man went astray and began to be capable of creating Frankenstein exactly at that point and has been toying around with this ever since and learning the language of how not to build tinkertoy Frankensteins but ones that really do work.

This is an extraordinary realization. But notice that packed in here, hidden in here – because we have to learn to– to read into it – the stone and the elixir, the stone, the Philosopher's Stone. The Red Lion process produces the– the red tincture, the Philosopher's Stone. But the Green Lion process produces the elixir, the clear gold, the transparent gold, the inner cell. That the– the convergence of the transformed processes comes to rest as a viable operative focus in the alchemist, not in the laboratory equipment, not in the metals but in the alchemist himself. And so later on when Rembrandt is doing a wonderful etching to try and convey this simple verity which is profound, he has the alchemist looking up from his work and looking to the window, and there in the window is the bright [inaudible] of all the patterned mandala, of the magical sigils all together. And that's what he looks to see. We'll try and get a slide– I have a slide of that somewhere.

This is Cosmic Man but he is very close to being Chaotic Man because if he doesn't look up and see that that that by that light he is able to do this then he makes the monsters then he makes the chimeras and in that process corrupts himself enormously because then all of the demonic resistances that are in the hebdomad come to have full reign in him and they play him. Goethe's Faust, when he realizes what strung out really is, repents about it. In the first part of Faust you have the development of the power of the individual. And then in the second part you have that corrupted individual, almost corrupted, put into this tremendous play of the archetypal opposites. In the second part of Faust, which isn't read too much anymore because it scares people, Oh, when you get that sort of power then you're put into a universe where that power is supposed to work. And if you don't work yet it works you.

So Paracelsus is a kind of individual who is always trying to keep it in perspective, but his perspective is one of tension, bombastic. Always one of– of dynamic. And so when he masters this, Trithemius’s warning is here, “If you wish to succeed in such a work” spirit and life have to be commensurate in nature so that in the art, in the work, they’re also commensurate. Without this the art goes astray. So that, in his writing on Aquafortis, Paracelsus writes,

“The stone is like the fire which purifies the rotten and soiled skin” and makes him there to be born anew. “It purifies the body of all the natural filth, with all [the] new and young forces. … so that no fault remains… [and] All things which corrupt nature must [then] yield before it.” And this was the transformation.

What Paracelsus does and what he stands for is this tremendous transition from understanding the medieval correspondences put into a Neoplatonic matrix whereby they can be seen universally and understanding how to do this exactly and specifically for the individual who is going to remain in the world. For in Plotinus the guideline is always towards leaving. The flight of the alone to the alone. In Paracelsus the Hermetic tradition finally comes around to having a message, a social message, that transformed man should remain in the world to help the others. That's his process.

And we'll see next week and we'll come to the emphasis on this and how Paracelsus styles the Hermetic tradition then so that Hermetic masters no longer talk about just achieving the self but always pair with it the living of the life – the good life. And the good life becomes then, not what it is today (a kind of a glib chivalry), but becomes a holy crusading objective of the Hermetic tradition. We must help our fellow men transform their lives. For the unity of mankind lies in this realization. The glittering lines of force, the star of antinomy for mankind as a whole, have to actually precipitate out here in this nature, on this planet, by our art. We now have the secret language. We know how to do this. Do we have the conscientiousness to actually stay in there and do it? Those are two different issues and we'll see next week how Paracelsus handles it.

Thank you.